


a sore subject

by mahariels



Series: tamar shepard [2]
Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-10
Updated: 2016-04-10
Packaged: 2018-06-01 11:10:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,263
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6516043
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mahariels/pseuds/mahariels
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>shepard, garrus, and liara head to edolus on a mission. the past never stays in the past.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a sore subject

Shepard, at the wheel of the Mako, white-knuckled as she fights to steer. 

It’d been a hard landing on Edolus, touching down in the midst of a screaming sandstorm that buffeted them back and forth. Garrus has control of the turret, but the horizon’s clear, so he sneaks glances sideways at her to see how she handles it. She handles it like she does almost everything else: weirdly calm, punctuated by bouts of filthy, furious cursing. 

Every time Garrus thinks he has Shepard figured out, she does something to prove him wrong. Like she knows. Like she wants to rub his mandibles in it.

He had a bad, bad feeling about the whole expedition from the start, more so as they draw closer to the distress beacon, dead center in the middle of a caldera with nothing for meters on either side. 

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” he says, just so she knows.

Shepard says, “Fucking right.”

Garrus doesn’t respond. Too busy bracing himself as the Mako lurches forward when she slams on the breaks. Shepard’s always doing that: too much of a hurry to actually _slow down_. Any protests he’d had, though, are forgotten when the thresher maw bursts from the rocky sand with a scream like seven different kinds of machinery exploding.

Shepard, normally impossible to shut up, is silent as she kicks the Mako back into gear and they go tearing off across the caldera, whirling a circle around the thing as it spits acid at them. The shields are going down if they’re hit dead on like that a few more times. 

Garrus barely has a chance to collect himself, but he’s working on instinct, already firing the cannon dead at the thing’s head. Two shots barely slow it, and with a furious shriek it leaps into the air, faster than it should be able to by all rights, and vanishes back into the ground.

The Mako’s silent. The only sounds are Shepard’s ragged breath, Liara’s gasp, and the guns—because of course, he’s ready when the thing jumps up again. Shepard is too. It lunges for them, but she’s already moving, taking them around at a sharp right. It’s not easy aiming when she’s got her foot jammed down on the accelerator, but he’s a professional if nothing else, and they’re not going to die because of Shepard’s terrible driving.

If there’s a spirit of _not dying in the mouth of a gigantic worm_ , that’s escaping him right now.

He narrows his eyes, holds his breath (not that it matters with the way Shepard’s tossing them around) and fires. The thresher maw screams again, and flops onto the ground with a sound like a ship crashing.

“Shepard, what—” he starts to say, but chokes on the words as she slams on the breaks again and he and Liara are thrown forward.

She’s already scrambling out of the Mako, _towards_ the monster.

“Commander Shepard, be careful, it’s not dead—” Liara starts to protest. It falls on deaf ears.

That’s a sight he never thought to see: Shepard, striding alone across the blasted surface of Edolus, zig-zagging to avoid the spitting acid, shotgun in her hands. He can’t see her face, so he doesn’t know what she’s thinking. But she stands in front of the dying monster and blasts it twice in the throat. Reloads. Blasts it again.

Garrus unbuckles the seatbelt (you need one of those, driving with Shepard) and leaps to the ground. Liara’s not far behind. The two of them stand a few feet behind her, uncertain of what to say—what to do.

“I think you killed it, Shepard,” Garrus says, after a while. There’s ending a threat and there’s overkill. That’s valuable ammo they could need later, but Shepard is… kicking the thing in the head. Violently. She’s on top of it, now, looking quite small as she stomps one beady little eye into a pulp.

“ _I know I fucking killed it_ ,” Shepard says, and turns the full weight of her fury onto the beacon. 

It’s easy to forget that Shepard is a biotic, because she mostly relies on pistols and in a pinch, the shotgun she’s nicknamed Kishkes (he never asked about that one). But he’s reminded now, as the blue glow of her power rips it from the ground and tosses it in the air. 

Abruptly, the beeping of its signal silences.

“Let’s go,” Shepard says, and Garrus and Liara exchange a _look_.

Garrus says, “Whatever you say, Commander.”

Later on, he’s working calibrating his gun when Shepard comes down to see him. He’s not exactly a novice when it comes to human expressions—he’s seen enough of them during his time at C-Sec—but he knows enough to know that most humans show emotion in their eyes and their mouths. One of the things he’s noticed about Shepard, particularly, is that her mouth rarely matches her eyes, and that she’s not an easy tell there, either.

“Vakarian,” she says.

“Shepard,” he says.

“I wanted to apologize for that—ah— _display_  on Edolus.”

He shrugs, suddenly uncomfortable. “You don’t have to explain anything to me.”

“I do,” Shepard says. Her voice is level, even. Her arms are behind her back—a human military posture. At ease. She does not seem at ease. “To you and Liara both. I’m in charge, and I—shouldn’t have lost control that way.”

He waits.

Shepard does not look down. Her forehead creases. “I know Liara’s already looked up my history, but it doesn’t seem like you have. Before I was tapped for N7, I was just a regular marine, and I volunteered for a mission on Akuze.”

Ah. It begins to make sense.

“We were sent to Akuze to investigate a colony that’d fallen out of contact suddenly. Fifty of us, and the transport ship we went down on. We found the colony, but it was like everyone had just—disappeared. There was blood. But no bodies. It was quiet until the sun set, and then… well. You know they say you don’t usually find more than one thresher maw at a time. On Akuze, there was a nest.”

“Shit.”

“It was—” She stops. In her strange, calm, way, she’s still struggling through it. “I don’t like to talk about it, Vakarian. Ever. There’s nothing that can be said. I was the only one to make it back alive, and there’s a fucking statue with my goddamn face on it, somewhere on that planet. I’ve never been to see it and I don’t fucking intend to.”

“Makes sense,” he says. 

“And this was too familiar.” Humans are strange: he wishes he was better at subtleties, beyond telling whether someone’s distressed, or lying. Commander Shepard isn’t like most humans he’s met, a contradiction of the things he’s usually taught himself to look for. “Those men walked into a trap, and they never had a fucking chance. Just like we didn’t. They just didn’t have anywhere to _run_. Not like I did.”

“We’re bringing the news back to Admiral Kahoku,” he says. “Whoever did it will be brought to justice.”

“Nothing’s going to bring those men back to life,” she says, with a shrug. “Those _things_  are fucking abominations, but they don’t know how to do anything except hunt. This is…worse, somehow. Anyway, Vakarian. It— _this_ —won’t happen again, and as your commanding officer, I wanted to tell you face-to-face.” 

She’s whirled on her heel and stalked away before he can react, leaving him with more questions than answers. But that’s Shepard for you, it seems.


End file.
